Program - Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony No. 41

Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:

CLASSICS • 2017/18 MOZART'S "JUPITER" SYMPHONY NO. 41 COLORADO SYMPHONY MARKUS STENZ, conductor KAREN GOMYO, violin This Weekend's Performances are Gratefully Dedicated to Young and Carolyn Cho Friday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Republic National Distributing Company Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Jennifer Heglin

Friday, November 3, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 4, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, November 5, 2017, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall WAGNER

Siegfried Idyll

SIBELIUS

Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47

Allegro moderato

Adagio di molto

Allegro ma non tanto

— INTERMISSION —

MOZART

Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, “Jupiter”

Allegro vivace

Andante cantabile

Menuetto: Allegretto

Molto allegro

SOUNDINGS 2017/18 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

KAUPO KIKKAS

MARKUS STENZ, conductor Markus Stenz, Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Conductor-in-Residence of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, is known for his vibrant, masterful musical interpretations with a special passion for German orchestral works. His previous positions have included: General Music Director of the City of Cologne and GürzenichKapellmeister, Principal Guest Conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, Music Director of the Montepulciano Festival, Principal Conductor of the London Sinfonietta, and Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Stenz’s expansive, multi-continental 2017-2018 season reflects the breadth of his artistry and international regard as an inspirational collaborator. Across North America, Stenz serves as guest conductor of the St. Louis, Colorado, Utah, and San Diego Symphonies, and the Minnesota Orchestra, with a fresh programming mix of the classical canon and lesser-known repertoire. Returning in his role as Principal Guest Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Stenz gives three performances in the fall of sprawling Germanic works

by Mendelsohn, Bruch, and Wagner as a part of the BSO’s “Wagner’s Quest” series; in the spring, he leads brilliant, lively programs of orchestral works by Beethoven, Korngold, Liszt, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and Wagner. Overseas, Maestro Stenz leads powerful programs at major halls in Brazil, Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and in South Korea. Markus Stenz has conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, Berlin Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, Vienna Symphony, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, and the Symphony Orchestras of the Bayerische Rundfunk, HR, WDR, and NDR. In the United States he has led the Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and St. Louis Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Boston and Dallas Symphony Orchestras. He resides in Cologne, Germany, with his family.

KAREN GOMYO, violin Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “a first-rate artist of real musical command, vitality, brilliance and intensity”, Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo captivates audiences worldwide. Karen Gomyo recently performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted

by Karina Canellakis, the WDR Orchestra Cologne and the Orchestre Symphonique de Radio France both conducted by Jakub Hrusa. Strongly committed to contemporary works, Karen Gomyo performed the North American premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s Concerto No. 2 “Mar’eh” with the composer conducting the National Symphony, as well as Peteris Vasks’ “Vox Amoris” with the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds, and has collaborated in chamber music compositions with Jörg Widmann, Olli Mustonen, and Sofia Gubaidulina. In recital and chamber music, Gomyo has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe. Chamber music collaborators have included Heinrich Schiff, Christian Poltéra, Alisa Weilerstein, Leif Ove

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Andsnes, and Christian Ihle Hadland. In 2018 she appears at the Seattle Chamber Festival and the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. Karen Gomyo has worked with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Danish National Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, among others, with such conductors as Sir Andrew Davis, Jaap van Zweden, Leonard Slatkin, Neeme Järvi, David Robertson, David Zinman, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, James Gaffigan, Pinchas Zukerman, Vasily Petrenko, and Cristian Macaleru. Recently, a documentary film produced by NHK Japan about Antonio Stradivarius called The Mysteries of the Supreme Violin, featured Gomyo as violinist, host, and narrator. Karen Gomyo plays on the “Aurora, exFoulis” Stradivarius violin of 1703 that was bought for her exclusive use by a private sponsor.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883): Siegfried Idyll Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig and died on February 13, 1883, in Venice. The Siegfried Idyll was composed in 1870 and premiered on December 25, 1870, at Triebschen, his home near Lucerne, conducted by the composer. The score calls for flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes. Marin Alsop was the conductor when the piece was last performed on November 11-13, 1999.

It was Cosima, Wagner’s wife, who started the family tradition of celebrating birthdays with a bit of Hausmusik when she had her husband awakened on his birthday in 1869 (May 22) by a musician blasting Siegfried’s horn call outside his bedroom door at dawn. The following year Cosima assembled a military band of 55 players in the grounds of Triebschen, their house near Lucerne, to serenade her husband with his own Huldigungsmarsch (“Homage March”). To return the kindness, Wagner wrote a chamber orchestra piece during November 1870 as a surprise for Cosima’s birthday, celebrated since her childhood on Christmas, a day after the actual date. He gave the score to the young Hans Richter, who was to be the first music director of Bayreuth, who copied out the parts, traveled to Zurich to engage musicians, and arranged rehearsals for December 11 and 21 in that city. (Cosima was a bit unsettled by her husband’s unexplained absences on those dates, but kept her peace.) The musicians arrived at Lucerne early on Christmas Eve, when Wagner held a final rehearsal in the Hôtel du Lac. The next morning, a Sunday, the small band of fifteen musicians — four violins, two violas (one played by Richter, who also handled the few trumpet measures in the last pages), cello, bass, flute, oboe, bassoon, and pairs of clarinets and horns — tuned in the kitchen, quietly set up their music stands on the narrow staircase leading to Cosima’s bedroom, with Wagner on the top landing, and began their music at exactly 7:30.

“I can give you no idea, my children, about that day, nor about my feelings,” Cosima wrote in the diary she left for her family. “As I awoke, my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music!

When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so were all the rest of the household.” The new piece was played twice again that day, separated by a performance of Beethoven’s Sextet. The “Triebschen Idyll” remained strictly a family affair until the financial distress caused by Wagner’s extravagant life style forced him to give it a public performance, at Meiningen on March 10, 1877, and sell the score for publication a year later, when it was titled Siegfried Idyll. “My secret treasure has become everybody’s property,” Cosima lamented.

Wagner incorporated into this orchestral lullaby the German children’s song Schlaf, mein Kind (“Sleep, My Child”), some newly composed strains, and two motives from the opera Siegfried, to which he was applying the finishing touches at the end of 1870.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957): Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865, in Hämeenlinna, Finland, and died on September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland. His Violin Concerto was composed in 1903 and premiered on February 8, 1904 in Helsinki, with Viktor Nováček as soloist and the composer conducting. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes. The concerto was last performed on May 11, 2014, when Joshua Bell was the soloist and Scott O’Neil conducted the orchestra.

The most famous image of Sibelius is the one seen in the photographic portraits of him in his old age — a stern, determined face unsoftened by a single lock of hair; a thick, strong body conditioned by years of healthy living in the bracing Finnish air; the aura of a man occupied by the highest level of contemplation, hardly disturbed by the vicissitudes of daily life. This picture of Sibelius may be partly correct for his last years — he produced no new music for the thirty years before his death and withdrew into the solitude of the Finnish forests, so reports were few — but it is very misleading for the time in which the Violin Concerto was produced.

By 1903, when he was engaged on the Concerto, Sibelius had already composed Finlandia, Kullervo, En Saga, the Karelia Suite, the four Lemminkäinen Legends (including The Swan of Tuonela) and the first two symphonies, the works that established his international reputation. He was composing so easily at that time that his wife, Aïno, wrote to a friend that he would stay up far into the night to record the flood of excellent ideas that had come upon him during the day. There were, however, some disturbing personal worries threatening his musical fecundity.

Just after the premiere of the Second Symphony in March 1902, Sibelius developed a painful ear infection that did not respond easily to treatment. Thoughts of the deafness of Beethoven and Smetana plagued him, and he feared that he might be losing his hearing. (He was 37 at the time.)

In June, he began having trouble with his throat, and he jumped to the conclusion that his health was about to give way, even wondering how much time he might have left to work. Though filled with fatalistic thoughts, he put much energy into the Violin Concerto, and even, when he was dissatisfied with it after the first performance, continued work on it for another year, until he felt it to be perfected. The ear and throat ailment continued to plague him until 1908, when a benign tumor was discovered. It took a dozen operations until it was successfully removed, and the anxiety about its return stayed with him for years, but he enjoyed sterling health for the rest of his days and lived to the ripe age of 91.

Aggravating Sibelius’ worries about his health in 1903 was the constant financial distress in which he was mired. His family was growing, and his works did not bring in enough to support them in the life style he desired. He was always in debt and wrote frequently to his brother, a physician in Germany, about the difficulty of making a decent living as a serious composer.

For relaxation, Sibelius liked to frequent the local drinking establishments in Helsinki, and his generous and uncomplaining wife often found him unaccounted for after a day or two. Only once did she go to find him. That was when the finale of this Concerto had to be finished so the parts could be copied in time for the first performance. She set out with Robert Kajanus, conductor, staunch advocate of Sibelius’ music and friend of the family, and found Jean in one of his numerous haunts. The move to the country house at Järvenpää, more than twenty miles north of Helsinki, was prompted in large part by the need to provide Sibelius with a quiet place

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES free from the distractions of city life. During those years of intense creative activity, Sibelius was a long way from that granitic old man of later years.

The Violin Concerto’s opening movement employs sonata form, modified in that a succinct cadenza for the soloist replaces the usual development section. The exposition consists of three theme groups — a doleful melody announced by the soloist over murmuring strings, a yearning theme initiated by bassoons and cellos with rich accompaniment, and a bold, propulsive strophe in march rhythm. The development-cadenza is built on the opening motive and leads directly into the recapitulation of the exposition themes.

The second movement could well be called a “Romanza,” a descendant of the long-limbed lyricism of the Andantes of Mozart’s violin concertos. It is among the most avowedly Romantic music in any of Sibelius’ works for orchestra. The finale launches into a robust dance whose theme the esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey thought could be “a polonaise for polar bears.” A bumptious energy fills the movement, giving it an air reminiscent of the Gypsy finales of many 19th-century violin concertos. The form is sonatina, a sonata without development, here employing two large theme groups.

 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791): Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, “Jupiter” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg and died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. The “Jupiter” Symphony was composed in 1788. There is no record of its first performance. The score calls for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes. Pinchas Zukerman conducted the orchestra when the symphony was last performed on November 16 and 17, 2007.

Mozart’s life was starting to come apart in 1788 — his money, health, family situation, and professional status were all on the decline. He was a poor money manager, and the last years of his life saw him sliding progressively deeper into debt. One of his most generous creditors was Michael Puchberg, a brother Mason, to whom he wrote a letter which included the following pitiable statement: “If you, worthy brother, do not help me in this predicament, I shall lose my honor and my credit, which I so wish to preserve.”

Sources of income dried up. His students had dwindled to only two by summer, and he had to sell his new compositions for a pittance to pay the most immediate bills. He hoped that Vienna would receive Don Giovanni as well as had Prague when that opera was premiered there the preceding year, but it was met with a haughty indifference when first heard in the Austrian capital in May 1788. He could no longer draw enough subscribers to produce his own concerts, and had to take second billing on the programs of other musicians. His wife, Constanze, was ill from worry and continuous pregnancy, and spent much time away from her husband taking cures at various mineral spas. On June 29, their fourth child and only daughter, Theresia, age six months, died.

Yet, astonishingly, from these seemingly debilitating circumstances came one of the greatest miracles in the history of music. In the summer of 1788, in the space of only six weeks, Mozart

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES composed the three greatest symphonies of his life: No. 39, in E-flat (K. 543) was finished on June 26; the G minor (No. 40, K. 550) on July 25; and the C major, “Jupiter” (No. 41, K. 551) on August 10.

The “Jupiter” Symphony stands at the pinnacle of 18th-century orchestral art. It is grand in scope, impeccable in form and rich in substance. Mozart, always fecund as a melodist, was absolutely profligate with themes in this Symphony. Three separate motives are successively introduced in the first dozen measures: a brilliant rushing gesture, a sweetly lyrical thought from the strings, and a marching motive played by the winds. The second theme is a simple melody first sung by the violins over a rocking accompaniment. The closing section of the exposition (begun immediately after a falling figure in the violins and a silence) introduces a jolly little tune that Mozart had originally written a few weeks earlier as a buffa aria for bass voice to be interpolated into Le Gelosie Fortunate (“The Fortunate Jealousy”), an opera by Pasquale Anfossi. Much of the development is devoted to an amazing exploration of the musical possibilities of this simple ditty.

The thematic material is heard again in the recapitulation, but, as so often with Mozart, in a richer orchestral and harmonic setting.

The ravishing Andante is spread across a fully realized sonata form, with a compact but emotionally charged development section. The Minuet is a perfect blend of the lighthearted rhythms of popular Viennese dances and Mozart’s deeply expressive chromatic harmony.

The finale of this Symphony has been the focus of many a musicological assault. It is demonstrable that there are as many as five different themes played simultaneously at certain places in the movement, making this one of the most masterful displays of technical accomplishment in the entire orchestral repertory. But the listener need not be subjected to any numbing pedantry to realize that this music is really something special. Mozart was the greatest genius in the history of music, and he never surpassed this movement. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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